Metastatic Marxism

Ideas have consequences. Some ideas are mightier than swords. Deadlier too. As Terry Pratchett warns: "Unfortunately, wild and unstable ideas have a disturbing tendency to move around and take hold." Some of the wildest and most devastating ideas came from Karl Marx. Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, those ideas still corrupt American youth. The most vulnerable are students exposed to the influence of anti-capitalist instructors in the fields of economics, philosophy, history, and political science. A multitude of falsehoods thrive in our academic centers where tenured faculty members pass their dogmatic views on to kids who are still thinking mostly with their hearts. They don't come with horns and pitchforks---some are very nice people, intelligent and full of good intentions, as was a recent Marxist guest speaker at The King's College.

As millions of people in the former communist countries mourn the victims of practical Marxism, leftists of all flavors are struggling to raise the red banner one more time. Socialist professors and their brainwashed disciples are in the forefront of the fight against American imperialism and economic neo-colonization. Our universities have become hatcheries for anti-globalists trying to persuade the developing nations that breaking their economic links with the West will protect their people from exploitation.

Traditional Marxism has been marginalized but not before it had metastasized. Hoping to catch in their webs as many confused souls as possible, today's socialists redefine their idol's ramblings for class struggle to mask it as a fight for race and gender equality. The infiltration of failed "progressive" ideas diverts civil rights and environmental movements from the real problems of our generation. It is getting so bad that even the president of the United States sees no problem surrounding himself with Maoists.

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Those are some of the reasons why, 20 years after the fall of the Iron Curtain, we still cannot celebrate the victory over the "empire of evil." Yes, socialism is far from dead. We cannot pronounce it dead until it evaporates from those heads where the lies of the omniscience and omnipotence of government still reside. One thing we need to teach our children is that for democracy to really mean freedom and not a dictatorship of special interests, it cannot coexist with pervasive bureaucratic control of our economic affairs.

Alex Tokarev

Alex is the chair of the Department of Business at Morthland College in West Frankfort, Ill., and teaches at Northwood University in Midland, Mich. The native of communist Bulgaria fanatically supports the Bulgarian soccer team, Levski.